Knowledge is an ocean and a few drops just aren’t enough. -Unknown

I wanna do this when I grow up. I remember when I went to Sophie Davis college and was thinking that we do need clinics that provide free healthcare and run on philanthropy. I figured after going abroad I’d be able to come back and do something like this. Maybe inshAllah I will.

If you’re part of the Stony Brook MSA… please skip this post…Should be out in the next Minaret inshAllah.

Habib Ali al-Jifri once compared the Qur’an to a letter sent to us from Allah. It makes sense if you think about it. The Qur’an is the word of Allah. It is unlike the Bible or the Torah. The Bible is a compilation of what Jesus said and did and the Torah is written in a manner different from the Qur’an.

The word Qur’an is derived from a word that means “recitation.” Verily, the Qur’an is also a book that is to be oft-recited. We recite the Qur’an in salah; we pray and implore Allah’s forgiveness from verses revealed in the Qur’an; we even recite dua from the Qur’an. But much too often, we don’t reflect or try to learn what the Qur’an really tells us.

Habib Ali narrated a scene that is similar to the dilemma we face with the Qur’an. Imagine a king sending a letter to you inviting you to his court for an assembly. You read the letter aloud in a beautiful voice and then put it aside. You don’t attend the assembly. The king asks his messenger why you haven’t responded to the letter. The king sends another letter. There is no response. He asks “where is my subject whom I invited?”Someone tells the king that you are contemplating the letter. The king says, “Fine, where is he?? The letter says to come to me!” The messenger says that you read the letter with a beautiful voice and manners. But the king is not satisfied. He still wants to know where you are. He asks again where you are. The messenger says, “He’s reading your letter! Is it not enough that he read your letter?”

This response would surely not satisfy the king. He has invited you to come to him and you do not respond. You read his letter and do so beautifully but ignore the content. But Allah is the King of kings! The King of kings has sent us a letter saying race to My Forgiveness. He tells us to turn to Him. But we ignore this or haven’t turned to Allah.

We take the letter and stick it on a shelf. We leave it to sit there. It’s forgotten on our bookshelves. Habib Ali makes the point that obviously we have not done a good job receiving this letter. Nor do we understand the message contained in this letter. Yes, we learn tajweed and gain hasanat by reading the Qur’an properly. I will not belittle the importance that has. But do we listen to this message? Do we understand what Our King is saying to us?

There is no RSVP on this letter we’ve received. So we neglect it. We leave it on the shelf. But we do not realize that the RSVP is not written on the card, but it is written in Allah’s book. The date we must respond by is the date of our death. But we do not know when this day will come. It can come at any second, but we do not have this sense of urgency. My mother’s coworkers relative just passed away in a car accident. He had just turned 18. We’ve all heard of accidents occurring and people dying but how real is it to us?We are not invincible youth. Our death is written but we go live in this dunya as if we will live forever. He was 18. He was our age. A Muslim. His death was written at that moment, at that time.

Our time is fleeting. This dunya is temporary. How can we die without having a connection to Allah? He has given us His letter, the Qur’an. He has laid out for us the path to reach Him in this Qur’an. He gave us a guide in the Prophet (SAWS) to lead us along the way. He has bestowed upon us countless blessings and gifts. But we are heedless of His words. We must ask Allah to open our hearts and ears to His words. Allah is calling us to Him. We must answer this call.

I really must stress the importance of reciting the Qur’an daily and either reading a Tafsir with it (like Ibn Kathir or Maariful Quran) or learning Arabic yourself to at least get the meaning of the verses we recite daily. The Qur’an is not a joke or something to be lightly. The Prophet (SAWS) said, “And the Qur’an is a proof for you or against you.” [Muslim] Learning the Qur’an and its exegesis is not only beneficial for us in this world, but has tremendous reward in the Hereafter. Likewise, neglecting it means having it testify against you on the Day of Judgment. Let us not ignore this letter from Allah. May Allah make us people of the Qur’an and of its understanding.

“This is a Scripture that We have revealed unto thee, full of blessing, that they may ponder its revelations, and that men of understanding may reflect.” [38.29]

Somehow, I randomly came across this. Brother Ibrahim Z. wrote about it and I saw it and there’s the story 😀

This is a reflection/response by an Israeli (Jewish atheist– don’t ask me how you can be both, but I’m sure he uses it to shed light on his background) about the words of the Pope. It can be found here. Uri Avnery, an Israeli writer and peace activist, founded the Gush Shalom movement. He had served three terms as an MP at the Knesset.

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306 – exactly 1700 years ago – encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.

The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, “walked to Canossa”, standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope’s castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week’s speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush’s crusade against “Islamofascism”, in the context of the “Clash of Civilizations”.

IN HIS lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God’s actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this “war of civilizations”.

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?

To support his case, the Pope quoted – of all people – a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had – or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) – with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

These words give rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say them? (b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope quote them?

WHEN MANUEL II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.

At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. On May 29, 1453, only a few years after Manuel’s death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.

During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.

In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim “Axis of Evil”. Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

——–Munzareen: I thought that was a VERY interesting parallel even if it puts George Bush in a Star Wars kind of ideology———

IS THERE any truth in Manuel’s argument?

The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur’an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: “There must be no coercion in matters of faith”.

How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur’an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes – Christian, Jewish and others – in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith.

Jesus said: “You will recognize them by their fruits.” The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to “spread the faith by the sword”?

Well, they just did not.

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith – and they were the forefathers of most of today’s Palestinians.

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the “spreading of the faith by the sword”?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi (“Spanish”) Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the “peoples of the book”. In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service – a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion – because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times “by the sword” to get them to abandon their faith.

THE STORY about “spreading the faith by the sword” is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims – the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?

There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of “Islamofascism” and the “Global War on Terrorism” – when “terrorism” has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush’s handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world’s oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers’ expedition becomes a Crusade.

The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?

Yes, I attempted to highlight important parts so they’d stick out. And then I realized as I was reading it that the author makes very valid claims. He makes good historical parallels. Though I will say I’m sad at how Muslims act and react nowadays, I know it is NOT a part of our religion to burn churches, kill people, threaten the death of innocents. How wonderful it would be if we could all go back to that Golden Age. Where the three Abrahamic faiths coexisted. Where they lived as brothers, each with his own set of beliefs, but not harming the other. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could learn true tolerance? Not just words uttered on the tongue, but promises made in the heart. Respect one another, even if you disagree. Teach one another how to live as humanity. We all have similar morals. Let’s stick by them. The news is increasingly depressing. People victimizing others, threatening them, abusing them, killing them. What world do we live in? Why can’t we live by the morals our religions taught us. Why can’t we live as Confucius said? Why can’t we learn from Mother Teresa? Why can’t we see that beyond these ideological differences we all bleed, we all cry, we all are in this world together and must cooperate if we are to see peace at all?

"We have devoted our lives to seeking knowledge of the heart; knowledge that will carry us to our soul’s destination. Your minds have limits but not your hearts, for they are receptacles of endless capacity. But, you must open your hearts to this knowledge, as nothing may pass through what is closed.”

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.- Isaac Asimov